The latest version of Transaction Monitoring software from BlueStripe Software includes application-aware health monitoring of Azure-based application components. The software, called FactFinder, allows IT Operations teams that use Microsoft System Center to see the health and performance of all their distributed applications inside System Center Operations Manager, the health status of all data center infrastructure components, and the health status of any Azure-based components.

“Performance monitoring is so much more complicated today, with complex distributed applications, cloud-based infrastructure, and a growing user population,” said Chris Neal, CEO of BlueStripe Software. “FactFinder’s application-aware management of transactions, on-premise servers, and Azure-based components allows IT Operations teams to manage each application component from the perspective of overall application performance.”

Application-aware infrastructure performance monitoring shows IT Operations teams all the applications any individual server supports. By placing all pertinent health and performance information in a single screen within Operations Manager, the BlueStripe + System Center integrated solution provides IT Operations a single view for end-to-end distributed application monitoring. With this single view, IT Operations can understand how a single component in the data center or the Azure cloud impacts overall application health and service delivery.

FactFinder automatically discovers, maps, and monitors all business transactions running within the data center and across the Cloud. FactFinder measures performance, hop-by-hop, everywhere that transactions go, across tiers, across platforms, and across architectures – even into virtual machines, public, private, and hybrid cloud, as well as third party services. When performance or availability problems occur, FactFinder follows the slow or hung transaction right to the problem component, and then drills down the server stack to determine why the problem occurred.

A member of the System Center Alliance, BlueStripe has delivered integrated solutions with Microsoft System Center 2007 R2 and System Center 2012 for several years. While each solution can each stand alone, together FactFinder and System Center make a powerful combination for IT Operations teams of all sizes.

The US National Telecommunications & Information Administration has announced plans to transition the oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) from the US Department of Commerce to a new form of multi-stakeholder oversight.

This measure could put an end to the US government’s authority over the system of addresses and domain names that organize the Internet.

Individuals and other governments have complained that the department’s contract with ICANN gives the US unique influence over the internet. But after this contract expires in September 2015, ICANN will be overseen by a new yet-determined body made up of various international stakeholders who have an interest in how the Internet is managed.

US Senator John Thune, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said that he wants an open and innovative Internet free of bureaucratic or political tampering.

“The US helped create the Internet, and we want to see it grow and stand on its own. It doesn’t need a nanny state, or a collection of nanny states, trying to stifle it,” stated Sen. Thune. “It needs – and deserves – a strong multi-stakeholder system free from the control of any government or governmental entity and which keeps the critical Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions insulated from the politics of Internet governance.”

This plan is being praised as a brilliant compromise that doesn’t give one party too much control (whether it’s the US or the UN), yet it still holds ICANN accountable to stakeholders, ensuring that the organization itself can’t act completely autonomously.

In February, EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes called for a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance, and last year ICANN created its own “Future of Global Internet Cooperation” panel committed to a multistakeholder approach.

But this possible change in how the internet is overseen has many speculating how it will affect various companies involved, including Verisign, which operates the authoritative domain name registries for .com and .net. And while experts have noted that it’s unlikely that VeriSign could lose its own .com registry contract set to expire in 2018, VeriSign’s share prices have fallen dramatically after the government announced its decision.

VeriSign issued the following statement: “The announcement does not impact Verisign’s .com or .net domain name business nor impact its .com or .net revenue or those agreements, which have presumptive rights of renewal.

“The NTIA announcement involves Internet functions that are entirely different functions from those Verisign performs under its .com and .net agreements. The functions performed by Verisign involved in the NTIA announcement have been performed as a community service spanning three decades without compensation at the request of the Department of Commerce under the Cooperative Agreement.”

The NTIA’s decision is also not without opponents. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation senior analyst Daniel Castro has noted that the revelation of the extent of US digital espionage has acted as a catalyst for this decision, when, in fact, this is an entirely different issue.

Castro also notes that US oversight “played an essential role in maintaining the security, stability, and openness of the Internet and in ensuring that ICANN satisfies its responsibilities in effectively managing the Internet’s Domain Name and Addressing System.” He contends that countries such as Russia or China might use their new power in ICANN to censor online content outside their borders.

Still, many are eager to see a multi-stakeholder approach, and the US has long planned to roll out such an approach.

ICANN’s Board Chair Stephen D. Crocker said in a statement, “The US has long envisioned the day when stewardship over them would be transitioned to the global community. In other words, we have all long known the destination. Now it is up to our global stakeholder community to determine the best route to get us there.”

The US undoubtedly wants to protect the internet. Perhaps setting it free of unilateral control might be the best way for this to happen.

Telecommunications company Vodafone Group launched a new ‘Made in Germany’ cloud and hosting service this week, targeting customers in the Frankfurt metropolitan area who want to keep their data stored close to home, according to a report by Telecompaper.

While Vodafone is known primarily for its wireless business, the company is looking at ways to expand “more and more outside mobile” by going into web hosting, security, and entertainment, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said in a presentation at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, this week.

Localized hosting and cloud services has always been important in Europe, and Germany in particular, but it has grown as concerns around international government snooping have escalated. Germany in particular is one of Europe’s largest proponents for storing data locally, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has even gone so far as proposing a separate European communications network that would keep data within the EU, disabling it from passing through US-based servers.

Vodafone has to make up some ground in Germany after seeing its revenue start to slip, which is problematic considering the German market accounts for nearly one-fifth of sales, according to Bloomberg. To that end, Vodafone is betting its $10.4 billion purchase of Kabel Deutschland will help boost revenue in Germany.

Currently, Deutsche Telekom is the top mobile operator in Germany, with Vodafone in second place. Last week Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership with CipherCloud to provide encrypted cloud services to enterprises in Germany.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service has recently become generally availability in Europe, providing customers the flexibility to stretch their IT resources across their on-premise infrastructure and an off-premise data center in Slough, UK, that meets UK and EU compliance and data sovereignty demands.

vCHS is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud operated by VMware and built on VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform for cloud infrastructure. By providing a secure off-premise environment, it adds an easy route for private clouds to become hybrid clouds. VMware launched vCHS in the US in 2013, and the company plans on launching more locations across Europe in 2014.

For the users of its UK cloud, VMware provides fully-redundant server infrastructure using VMware vSphere vMotion and VM availability guarantees.

Concern over data residency and compliance are also high among UK enterprises.

In a recent poll of 200 VMware enterprise customers in the UK, VMware found that 86 percent said it was important to be able to store data in UK-based clouds to comply with residency regulations, and over half said they were legally required to meet these residency requirements. Meanwhile, VMware also found that 20 percent of those surveyed were unaware of where all of their data currently resides.

“VMware vCloud Hybrid Service provides VMware customers with the flexibility to dynamically move workloads into a VMware public cloud as business and market opportunities dictate, whilst ensuring they’re in control of compliance and security within their region,” VMware EMEA Cloud Services VP and GM Gavin Jackson said in a statement.

Customers will have term-based subscriptions based on capacity. Specific pricing information has not been released.

Poland has the highest adoption of cloud in the Eastern European region, according to a recent report by Austrian IT company Kapsch.

Polish small and medium-sized enterprises are using cloud services more than any other country in the region with the exception of Turkey. Thirty-one percent of Polish SMEs surveyed for the report said they use a cloud service.

According to a report by ZDNet on Monday, one in five Romanian companies use a cloud service, and 29 percent of companies in Western Austria subscribe to a cloud service.

The report surveyed 900 IT managers from seven countries, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia. The average cloud use across the seven countries is 27 percent.

Thirty-percent of IT managers in Poland plan to migrate at least part of their data to cloud computing within the next three years, and 25 percent plan to buy integrated communication systems.

Around 30 percent of Polish companies allow their employees to use their own mobile devices at work, compared with the 25 percent average across the region. Austria leads in BYOD, with 36 percent of IT managers reporting to allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets at work.

According to a separate report cited by ZDNet by market research company PMR, the value of the entire cloud market in Poland last year was around €75 million, a 30 percent increase year-over-year.

The central challenge around cloud adoption in Poland is awareness, and educating users on the differences between servers, cloud instances, VPS and dedicated servers or shared hosting, according to ZDNet.

Recently, the WHIR talked to CDN starup CDNlion about its Prague-based business and how it differentiates its CDN on the OnApp platform.

Codero Hosting, a leading provider of dedicated, managed, cloud and hybrid hosting services, named Eli Bowman as CFO. Since 2008 he served as VP of Finance and Controller and was previously the company’s Director of Business Analysis. He is responsible for treasury duties including financing structure and the investment of company funds, economic strategy, and forecasting.

“We strive to create an optimal balance between internal promotion and external hiring. Eli has been an integral part of the Codero team since the beginning and he has performed remarkably,” said Emil Sayegh, CEO of Codero Hosting. “The last two years have been an amazing transformation as we have accelerated to beat the industry in terms of growth. As we continue our expansion geographically and with the On-Demand Hybrid Cloud product, we anticipate that Eli will continue positioning Codero for long-term multi-faceted success.”

Prior to beginning his tenure with Codero, Bowman served as a senior financial analyst with GE Insurance Solutions and was a senior product analyst with Aquila Energy. He earned his BS in Actuarial Science & Mathematics from the University of Central Missouri.

Codero continues to expand its team and is hiring for a number of positions. For more information, visithttp://www.codero.com/careers/.

About Codero Hosting
Codero Hosting delivers world-class dedicated, managed, cloud and hybrid hosting solutions on-demand for businesses of all sizes on a global basis. Codero integrates innovative industry-leading IT hosting solutions that are fully automated with all customer service delivered by a seasoned and highly technical US-based team. This allows companies to confidently outsource their IT hosting needs while empowering them with complete control over their IT environment. Codero offers hosting from its Phoenix, Arizona and Ashburn, Virginia data centers. All Codero services and products are backed by SAS 70 Type II secure data centers, live U.S.-based 24/7/365 support and a seasoned staff. An industry innovator, Codero has the only customer loyalty Rewards Program of any of the major industry players, as well as attractive, and rewarding affiliate, channel, and reseller programs. Codero is backed by growth private equity firm Catalyst Investors. For more information about Codero, please visithttp://www.codero.com or connect with Codero on Twitter and Facebook.

Garantia Data, a provider of Redis and Memcached cloud services, announced on Wednesday the launch of its Redis Cloud service built on SoftLayer’s cloud platform.

Developers using SoftLayer can now build and create applications with infinite scalability using Redis cloud. Garantia Data said that Redis is the fastest data store available today, so developers can expect top performance and high availability from their applications. Currently there are 15,000 developers using Redis on the cloud.

“‘Do it yourself’ open source Redis setups that are installed on virtual servers or bare metal resources work great when they’re small or if you have expert resources who can attend to and manage your Redis datasets, but developers who take this approach often encounter daunting challenges with negotiating scaling barriers, ensuring the availability of Redis processes, effectively persisting the volatile data that’s stored in RAM, and really understanding how to deploy Redis and Softlayer’s resources to achieve optimal results for each specific use case,” Itamar Haber, Vice President of Developer Advocacy at Garantia Data said in a blog post on IBM’s cloud blog. “To mitigate these issues, Redis Cloud ensures high-availability with in-memory replication and instant failover, provides data-durability using SoftLayer’s SAN for data-persistence, and optimizes performance by utilizing bare-metal instances.”

“Developers demand high performance computing power and speed from the cloud. With the addition of Redis Cloud, the leading managed Redis solution on SoftLayer’s cloud platform, developers will benefit from unmatched infrastructure and Garantia Data’s enterprise-class Redis so they can build scalable, highly available, and top performing apps,” Mac Devine, CTO of IBM Cloud Services Division and director of cloud innovation said.

Last year, Rackspace acquired Exceptional Cloud Services, a provider of Redis as a Service.

ServInt, an innovative provider of managed cloud hosting for businesses worldwide, today introduced its new SolidFire SSD VPS product line, designed to dramatically increase the speed and reliability of small-business web sites.

The SolidFire SSD VPS is a complete reimagining of ServInt’s decade-old VPS platform, redesigned from the ground up to solve the longstanding problems of VPS environments faced by the entire web and cloud hosting industry.

ServInt focused its redesign efforts on maximizing speed, resource transparency, and delivering complete resource-performance guarantees at every level. The resulting new platform couples the raw speed of massive SSD storage arrays with performance guarantees, including disk-speed performance guarantees enabled by SolidFire, at price points that make SolidFire and SSD accessible to small businesses for the very first time anywhere.

Perhaps the greatest advantage offered by ServInt’s SolidFire SSD VPS is the elimination of disk-resource contention, or “the noisy neighbor problem.” Until the introduction of SolidFire storage technology, VPS-based hosting service providers had no means of ensuring that their customers were getting their fair share of disk input/output resources – particularly if there was a “neighbor” on their server who was running a disk-intensive application and intermittently taking all the IOPS for themselves. Now, with its SolidFire SSD VPS, ServInt is providing real guarantees on minimum sustained IOPS, eliminating the last major server-based cause of site slow-downs for virtualized hosting customers.

“SolidFire’s IOPS QoS technology is absolutely state of the art, and we’re proud to be the only host bringing it to the small-business market,” said ServInt CEO and Founder Reed Caldwell. “Just as important, however, is the way we did it. We literally started from the ground up, building a completely new datacenter; new 10GigE network and 10GigE storage network, both with 2N redundancy; full integration of Parallels’ new PCS virtualization system; a custom tool set to allow seamless, instantaneous client provisioning and migration; and much more. This effort took the better part of a year, but we wanted to do more than just bolt a great new technology onto our hosting infrastructure. We wanted to spare no expense, and to do this better than anybody else possibly could – and that’s exactly what we did.”

ServInt CTO Matthew Loschert said, “The ServInt SolidFire SSD VPS is particularly well suited for small businesses because it provides complete resource-performance guarantees for many of the apps used by most small-business sites. This is especially true for e-commerce sites, sites that require blog caching, and sites that rely heavily on historical e-mail. Any database-driven or file-backed sites will benefit enormously from this product. Users of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento in particular will find our new product line to be highly beneficial.”

In addition to the speed and reliability advantages offered by the platform, ServInt’s SolidFire SSD VPS also offers near-instantaneous server upgrades and downgrades – i.e., true cloud scalability – as well as massive data redundancy and extremely rapid site recovery when needed.

About SolidFire

SolidFire is the market leader in all-flash storage systems designed for next generation data centers. Leveraging SolidFire’s all-flash architecture, with volume-level Quality of Service (QoS) controls, customers now can guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. Coupling this functionality with in-line data reduction techniques and system-wide automation results in substantial capital and operating-cost savings relative to traditional storage systems.

About ServInt

ServInt is a pioneering provider of high-reliability, managed cloud hosting services for enterprises worldwide. Founded in Northern Virginia in 1995, ServInt provides a range of IaaS, PaaS, VPS and dedicated server packages to hosting service resellers, web designers, developers and online businesses in more than 130 countries. To learn more about ServInt’s cloud, VPS and dedicated hosting solutions, please call 1-800-573-7846 from the USA, +1-703-847-1381 from outside the USA or visit www.servint.net.

In an effort to drive the development and adoption of new open-source technologies, Red Hat is taking a more active role in the CentOS Project, which oversees CentOS, a community-supported and produced Linux distribution that draws on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open-source technologies.

According to a press call Tuesday evening, Red Hat sees CentOS (the “Community ENTerprise Operating System”) as a way customers can get a robust, free OS, but also be set on a path towards subscription-based RHEL.

Red Hat’s contributions and investment will help the CentOS Project expand and enable components to be layered on top of CentOS such as OpenStack, RDO, Gluster, OpenShift Origin, and oVirt.

Red Hat will be contributing resources and expertise to CentOS and become a “catalyst” in the CentOS community. It will be doing this through opening the governance model to allow new contributors, fostering special groups for specific focuses such as SDN, and allowing for the creation of custom CentOS variants. Red Hat has also hired some of the core CentOS contributors.

The major change in the relationship between Red Hat and CentOS, writes to ZDNet blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, is that “Red Hat won’t be keeping CentOS at arm’s length anymore.”

In turn, Red Hat anticipates its role in the CentOS community to accelerate its development of enterprise-grade subscription solutions, such as RHEL, RHEL OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Much like Fedora, which Red Hat launched a decade ago, CentOS represents a platform that’s open to variation. While CentOS no doubt will be adopting leading-edge open source technologies, Red Hat said Fedora will continue to serve as the upstream project on which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases are based.

Vocus, Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS), a leading provider of cloud-based marketing and public relations software and consulting services, today announced that PAPCO, a proven leader in innovative fuel solutions, has selected Vocus Marketing Suite and the company’s consulting services to launch its brand into competitive new markets in the petroleum industry. The energy company chose the Marketing Suite because of its comprehensive, integrated marketing automation tools and the easy-to-analyze dashboard metrics.

Based in Virginia Beach, Va., PAPCO serves a wide customer base of mid-to-large fuel consumers throughout the Eastern United States including gas station owners, large commercial transportation companies and federal, state, and municipal government agencies. For over 30 years, PAPCO has offered an exceptional and diverse portfolio of energy-related products and services by leveraging its vast industry expertise and market knowledge, making it a widely trusted energy partner. The company turned to Vocus to achieve its marketing goals of building awareness, enhancing brand value, improving the customer experience, and increasing sales and market share.

“PAPCO cultivates strong relationships with our audience to succeed in the volatile energy marketing industry. The Marketing Suite will help us deliver exemplary customer service and build trust with our audience,” said PAPCO Director of Marketing Frank Daniels. “As we expand into new markets, having an integrated tool that automates and optimizes our social media, PR, email and analytics activities will help us communicate with our growing audience and aid in increasing our market share.”

To further PAPCO’s mission of being recognized as an industry leader in providing innovative solutions through personalized customer care, the company’s marketing team will rely on the Suite’s Social CRM to create robust profiles of its customer base and the Recommendation Engine to aid them in engaging with customers online.

In addition to the Marketing Suite, PAPCO’s marketing team will also engage with the Vocus Marketing Consultants. “We’ll be relying on the Vocus Marketing Consultants to answer our questions about best practices and tactics in the business-to-business space and help guide our development of content marketing strategies for our target audiences,” said Daniels.

About PAPCO

PAPCO is a leading petroleum and energy supplier in the Eastern United States and markets refined fuels, lubricants, risk management products and fuel card fleet management programs to a broad customer base which includes industrial, retail, marine, commercial transportation companies (trucking, transit, railroad, marine) and federal, state, and municipal government end users in the Eastern United States. PAPCO backs their value-added services with its secure fuel supply capabilities through proprietary fuel storage locations and supply agreements with an established network of refiners, pipelines, terminals, and transportation providers that have been expanding since 1976.

PAPCO leverages over 30 years of experience in petroleum hedging and product trading to offer innovative price risk management solutions, allowing fuel users to better manage operating budgets and fuel cost. Additionally, PAPCO offers a diverse menu of other product and service solutions including fleet card services, fuel inventory management, on-line account management and storage systems. Through the use of the industry’s latest technology, PAPCO provides seamless fuel procurement and inventory management solutions to its clients that bring efficiencies and cost savings to their businesses.

About Vocus

Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS) provides leading cloud-based marketing and public relations software and consulting services enabling companies to acquire and retain customers. The company offers products and services to help clients attract and engage prospects, capture and keep customers, and measure and improve marketing effectiveness. More than 17,000 annual subscription customers across a wide variety of industries use Vocus software. The company is headquartered in Beltsville, MD with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.vocus.com or call (800) 345-5572.

Forward-Looking Statement

This release contains “forward-looking” statements that are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are predictive in nature, that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions or that include words such as “may,” “will,” “expects,” “projects,” “anticipates,” “estimates,” “believes,” “intends,” “plans,” “should,” “seeks,” and similar expressions. This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to, among other things, Vocus’ expectations and assumptions concerning future financial performance. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual future results to differ materially from those projected or contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may be significantly impacted by certain risks and uncertainties described in Vocus’ filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The risks and uncertainties referred to above include, but are not limited to, risks associated with possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of growth, our history of operating losses, risks associated with acquisitions, including our ability to successfully integrate acquired businesses, risks associated with our foreign operations, interruptions or delays in our service or our web hosting, our business model, breach of our security measures, the emerging market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to hire, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, competition, our ability to continue to release and gain customer acceptance of new and improved versions of our service, successful customer deployment and utilization of our services, fluctuations in the number of shares outstanding, foreign currency exchange rates and interest rate.